The 2017 British Eventing season - Part 2

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February 4, 2018

Following on from part 1, which looked at all the horses that competed in a British Eventing competition in 2017, I also produced graphs looking at the competitions themselves.

First, I plotted all competitions that ran in 2017 against their geographical location. Links between pairs of competitions are proportionate to the number of horses that competed in both of them. Then, I ran a clustering algorithm over the graph to find closely-related competitions. Unsurprisingly, there is a strong geographical element to this, until you reach the higher levels of competition. Blair Castle is the most obvious example of this, falling into the same cluster as Blenheim Palace, Osberton, etc rather than its fellow Scottish competitions.

Allowing the layout to be determined by the links between competitions (rather than geographical location) produces a similar graph. But, this time, Blair Castle is pulled downwards towards the other international competitions.

I also produced charts for some individual competitions, showing each horse and section. As in part 1, each circle represents a horse, but links between them are based on their relative placings within their section. Here's a selection of six events that I attended last year, with the first three placed horses in each section labelled.